Like Christmas – Ramble-y Reminiscence 1

After we first moved into the duplex, my sister was able to buy a brand new washing machine and dryer. We have never had a new one in the entirety of our lives, child and adult, until this moment. When she first showed them to me, they were white and shiny and new.

“It’s like Christmas!” I exclaimed and hugged the machines.

(Don’t judge me, they were beautiful.)

(Or judge me, I don’t really care all that much.)

This was something that I often forgot, however, so my sister would take me to look at them every time I had a memory blank.

“It’s like Christmas!” I would exclaim all over again and hug the machines as if I had never seen them before.

She enjoyed this display so much, my sister would take every opportunity to show them to me whenever I forgot that we had moved to the duplex.

I wonder if any who read this have had some kind of similar event in their lives. Not the memory blank, but the same feeling of surprised joy every time they saw something or someone.

Not Even That

You’ve often heard people say that they aren’t in charge of their lives, that they are just ‘along for the ride.’

How does it feel, then, to know that you don’t even have that?

When you are not even along for the ride in whatever is happening in your life? You are nothing more than a bystander watching as everything else goes on and everyone else leaves you behind?

How does it feel to be invisible, well and truly invisible, in your own life?

It feels like you are dying, slowly and surely and yet are already dead even though you are still moving and walking and eating and sleeping and doing everything that people do when they are alive and yet you are not actually living because you are not acknowledged at all.

You’re not even really surviving because parts of you are dying every day as life goes on all around you and yet not with you or even within you. To be in this perpetual funk that is truly killing you with each and every passing moment that it stays entrenched within your heart and mind.

Maybe some day that will change and you will live once more.

(I will live once more.)

But you don’t know when or where that will be.

(Or even if it will be.)

Written partially for this week’s Trifecta challenge ( and partially because I heard the sentence ‘along for the ride’ and this was what jumped into my head and out of my fingertips.